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Senegal's parity laws ensure women well represented in government

DAKAR, SENEGAL—Canvassing with Seynabou Wade felt like riding a float in the Santa Claus parade.

Musicians hammered their sabar drums around us. A male dancer flailed his arms and legs. Whistles shrilled. A pickup truck loaded with speakers blasted her name from behind us.

Senegalese mayor Seynabou Wade canvassing on the last day of municipal elections. Her list lost the vote, but she will remain a deputy in the national government. (Catherine Porter / Toronto Star)

The merchants in the congested market waved and clapped and danced as we pushed through, surging towards Wade whenever she stopped to talk to someone.

Wade was the mayor of Colobane-Fass-Gueule-Tapée — Dakar’s version of East York.

This was the last day of her reelection campaign. Campaigns, I was learning, are like three-legged dashes at the country fare. They are mercifully short: the campaign season in Senegal lasts only two weeks. Everyone thinks they can win: there are 450 registered parties running for around 28,000 council seats in 600 communities.

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And, they are particularly ungainly: Around half of the candidates are elected by majority vote, while the other half are elected by proportional vote, and none of them are picked individually. They are all part of teams, or “lists.”

There were some 2,700 lists this election.

Even the guy who drafted comics explaining the system told me “it is so enormously complicated, most lawyers can’t understand it.”

All the chaos adds to the excitement, and the elections were particularly exciting this year because, for the first time, every other name on those municipal lists belonged to a woman.

Four years after Senegal passed its parity law, it was finally coming into effect in the lower levels of government — where activists had always said it would have the most effect.

“That’s where women are really needed. It’s where the decisions that affect them are made,” says Fatou Kiné Camara, the president of Senegal’s female lawyers association.

The law requires half the candidates for every elected position to be female. And because of the list system, it ensures, more or less, the governments will be balanced.

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Take the national assembly, where the number of women deputies almost doubled in 2012. They now make up 43 per cent.

The country’s Prime Minister Aminata Touré is a woman.

Female members of the Canadian parliament, by comparison, make up 25 per cent of the house.

Their roles, for the most part, are to make babies, cook dinner and keep their husbands happy. There is even a specific Wolof verb for that. Jongué — to please your husband.

Men, on the other hand, are the real breadwinners. And the more bread they make, the more wives they can have.

Under civil law, Senegalese men can marry up to four women. Many marry more than one: more than 40 per cent of marriages in the country are polygamous.

Women, by contrast, can only legally have one husband. And they cannot legally leave that husband without “grave motive,” or his consent, the lawyer Camara explained to me. If they remarry, and their first husband didn’t register the divorce, they face bigamy charges and six months in jail.

Oh, there’s more. Under the country’s inheritance laws, men are entitled to twice as much as their sisters.

And while enrolment is equal in primary school, the number of girls starts to plummet later, often because they are married off. (Thirteen per cent of girls in rural Senegal, aged nine to 14, are married, despite the fact that it’s illegal.)

So how is it that this country shames Canada when it comes to women in politics?

I asked Wade that. She is a supporter of the parity law, even though she was elected before it came into effect. But she doesn’t see any contradiction.

“I am a first wife. My husband took a second wife and she is so cute,” she said. “Women in your country should have the courage to accept polygamy. It’s better than men having mistresses.”

Catherine Porter is a Star columnist who has gone on leave for a year to live in Dakar, Senegal. She writes about her adventures each week in the Life section. She can be reached at catherine_porter@rogers.com . You can follow her daily snapshots on Twitter @porterthereport.

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